Apathy Protest!

This Saturday the 8th of May in Wellington, there is a very tricksterish event happening which you should all go to. It starts at 4pm at the Charles Plimmer Park at the end of Majori Banks Street. This is part of a project by Toby Huddlestone and Sarah Jane Parton that will be broadcast live to Wysing Arts Centre in the UK. The artist statement below is really interesting as a take on the trickster theme that we are investigating this year at Freerange.

Protest Apathy stems from an observation that the best way to be subversive these days is to work ‘internally’; to puncture from the inside. The now antiquated mode of sticking your fingers up to authority just does not work any more, as more and more attempts at dissent and disobedience are subsumed by ‘the machine’ (authority/establishment/

government/media). The idea of proclaiming that ‘everything is OK’ and there is ‘no reason to moan’ is massively sarcastic – we know the opposite to be true. But by not defining one’s political stance and protesting in this way actually renders authority impotent, as they cannot stop something that is essentially about nothing and apparently ‘positive’. This ultimately becomes subversive, although knowingly non-specific.

Here’s a slightly low quality, but very interesting presentation by the artist about the Protest Apathy work.